Selective call receivers, such as pagers, receive radio frequency (RF) signals. Conventionally, the selective call receiver decodes message data contained in a received RF signal and alerts a user that a message has been received, subsequent to which the message may be stored in a memory. The selective call receiver may present the message to a user either automatically or manually, upon selection by the user. The message may, for example, be presented visibly by a display device, such as a liquid crystal display (LCD), or audibly by an audio speaker.
Additionally, the selective call receiver may present the user with internal status information. Because of the space constraints existing in conventional selective call receivers, however, the size of the LCD incorporated by the selective call receiver is usually kept to a minimum. Therefore, the status information to which the user has access is typically limited to an amount of information that can be easily displayed on a small LCD. Such status information may be displayed to inform the user when battery voltage is low, when the selective call receiver is out of range, when a received message duplicates a previously received message, etc. This status information is frequently presented to the user in the form of iconic indicators or alphanumeric abbreviations displayed on the LCD. Although, in this manner, the user may be informed of many different internal status parameters, such displays of status information are often difficult to decipher without consulting a product operation manual that describes the different icons and abbreviations.
If the selective call receiver uses an audio speaker as a presentation device, the status information to which the user has access is even more limited. In this case, the status information presented to the user may consist only of critical status information relevant to the operation of the selective call receiver. For example, the user may be informed by a tone emitted by the speaker if the voltage of a battery providing primary power to the selective call receiver drops below a predetermined threshold. If the selective call receiver is capable of presenting information about more than one internal operational parameter to the user, the user might be forced to remember the meanings of several different tones used to announce the status of the corresponding operational parameters. In either case, internal status information presented by the selective call receiver may not be easily understood by the user.
Thus, what is needed is a method and apparatus for transmitting status information from a selective call receiver to an external electronic device capable of coherently presenting large amounts of information to a user.